EBay using our Trade Marked business name for AdWords.

As the title suggests, upon searching for our site this evening I was surprised to see that eBay is using our business/website name for an AdWords keyword.

There is no question that I could stop this if I wanted to as this is a registered Trade Mark.

I would like to keep the name of this website anonymous for the time being.

I had to click on it once just to find out where eBay directed the potential customer. Thankfully, the page that loaded was a refined search for our listings only.

I am in two minds as to what the best decision here is. We do have a store on eBay and it is quite successful in its own right. However, we would like to drive as much business as possible to our website which of course has less overheads.

I would think that generally someone searching for our business name would expect to find our website, I don't really like the idea of our eBay store popping up as an option. However, I realise that there are some that prefer to shop on eBay (PayPal security etc.).

To be honest, about two months ago we changed the main contents folder for our website which resulted in every URL (except home page) changing. This obviously resulted in a temporary drop for most of our pages. For a while, our eBay store was the second result listed when searching for our business name. This has now steadily dropped (2 months later) to 4th position and I am sure soon it will drop even further.

I guess my point is that I am already working very hard to push the eBay reference out of the picture and replace it with our website URL's in the organic search results, so I don't really feel comfortable seeing the AdWords pop out when searching for our site.

Any thoughts? Leave it or file a trade mark violation to Google?

I bet if you were to check in the T&C's of EBay that you will find that you have agreed to EBay doing precisely what they are doing. A company (your company) cannot expand distribution through other outlets and then try to restrict those distributors from doing what you have agreed that they can do.

In this case, if sales through EBay is at a lower margin, you track unit sales not margin. I, when running a major hi tech company, used to distribute through Walmart and Sam's Club. My margin was much lower than through our normal retail outlets. I was working towards dominating market share. Share of market is sometimes more important than product profit margins.

Whether your strategy is to maximize margins or to sell in volume, it requires different strategies.

Bottomline: Love EBay or drop them.

Were you searching for the actual TM you are talking about? With Adwords, advertisers can set the title of an Ad to what you are searching for.

Lol EGOL yes very true, Try "Area 51", its amazing what is apparently for sale on eBay these days!! haha